seek to develop knowledge about language and languages as an important
element in the education of all children.language changen
change in a language which takes place over time. All living languages have
changed and continue to change.
For example, in English, changes that have recently been occurring include
the following:
aDistinctions in pronunciation in words such as which:witch and
pour:pore:poorhave disappeared or are disappearing in many varieties
of English.
bThe distinction between who(as in the person who bought the painting)
and whom(as in the person whom I like best) is being lost, with many
speakers using whoin both cases and a tendency among younger speakers
to use thatfor both.
c New words and expressions are constantly entering the language, e.g.
subprime(a risky loan, mortgage, or investment), bailout(rescue by a
government of a company on the brink of failure), blogosphere(all the
world’s BLOGs and their interconnections).
Language change should not be confused with language shift.
see also comparative historical linguistics, diachronic linguistics,
neologism, sound change
language classroom research n
see classroom-centred research
language comprehension n
the processes involved in understanding the meaning of written or spoken
language. Theories of language comprehension are an important aspect of
psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and second language acquisition.
Among the different processes involved are:
aPerceptual processing: attention is focused on the oral or written text
and parts of it are retained in short term memory. Some initial analysis
of the text may begin and attention is focused on cues which will help
identify constituents or meaningful sections of the text. These cues may be
pauses and acoustic emphasis in spoken text or punctuation or paragraph
separation in written text.
bParsing: words are identified and matched with representations in
long term memory (see memory) creating basic units of meaning
called propositions. Knowledge of the grammatical structure of
the target language is used to help identify constituents and arrive at
propositions.
language comprehension